Oziphantom wrote:Well loosing the side of the a screen and the bottom on a NES oh well(Its possibly even a feature).. even on the PS3 we still had a "safe area", but on a word processor, spreadsheet not acceptable
Sure ... it'd just be nice if games had been able to use the whole width. The NES (and almost all the 3rd-generation-and-newer consoles) targeted an active portion of the scanline of 75%; the C64 (and Apple 2) targets an active duty of 60%. IBM CGA, Atari 2600, and Amiga OCS target a 70% active duty.
Oziphantom wrote:the Programmers Reference Guide does have a table of "don't put this colour next this colour" (p152 if you are interested)
Yeah, that would be the low chrominance bandwidth.
Too bad the dots for "excellent" and "fair" in the scanned copy I found are indistinguishable:
not sure what spares the NTSC from blending vertically though, we use it in PAL as one of the blending techniques.
PAL and SECAM explicitly decode chroma using vertical subsampling, averaging the decoded chroma from any given scanline with the one before.
NTSC just doesn't. Better vertical color bandwidth, but worse horizontal color bandwidth.
End-of-SDTV NTSC sets often added a so-called "comb filter", i.e. the same thing as what PAL sets do, for the same reason (improving horizontal chrominance bandwidth at the cost of vertical). But that wasn't there in the 1980s.